This actually happened last night, but it’s taken me awhile to find the words to describe the horror.

Two important details for this story: my husband keeps onions and potatoes in a basket in our laundry room. It has no windows and is cooler, so they tend to last longer. Also, we live in the Midwest and those of you who live in the Midwest know that August brings an abundance of zucchini. Leave your car unlocked? Someone puts zucchini in it. Front porch? Zucchini gets left in a bag. You get the picture.

Last night, I go to do a load of laundry. I’m on medicine that makes me dizzy sometimes and of course, a dizzy spell hits. I grab onto a spare chair we keep next to the washing machine, which happens to be where the basket of potatoes and onions sits. When I grabbed the chair, I set it off kilter and knocked the basket sideways. No big deal, right? Except I also knocked over what looked to be a sealed bag of some sort that had slid behind the basket. I had a half second to wonder what it was before I heard the slosh of liquid and about a full second before the bag split open and I was drenched with what I can best describe as a putrid brown and yellow sludge that smelled like a combination of dirt, death, and the inside of Satan’s butthole.

Reader, it was BAD. I immediately start dry heaving and yelling for someone to help while trying (and failing) to reseal the bag. Against my better judgment, I look in, see what’s left of a zucchini swimming in a cesspool of putrescence that seems much larger than it should be. I realize that somehow a zucchini got placed down here and died a slow, sad, and smelly death when we forgot about it while it marinated in a sauna of ethylene gas just waiting to punish me like I’m the main character in an Old Testament story.

My teenagers come running in and both immediately join me in the dry heaving. My youngest runs away. My oldest apparently wants to stay in the will and ran to get 2 KN95 masks so we could at least begin cleaning. At some point, my husband gets home from walking the dog, wanders in confused, and also begins dry heaving, but after a solid 30 minute effort, we managed to get everything cleaned, trashed everything the putrescence touched, and bleached the floor because it was EVERYWHERE. I have taken two hot showers and I still feel like I smell it on me somewhere.

Next summer? This is a zucchini free house.

Tl;dr forgot about a zucchini, took a shower in the aftereffects of biodegradation